What does it mean to be aboriginal today? Sixty artists of aboriginal heritage address that question as they explore the evolution of identity among indigenous peoples of Canada and beyond in the four venues of the Contemporary Native Art Biennial.

The biennial’s third edition opens Saturday, April 30 at Art Mûr, the central pavilion where 28 artists explore the event’s theme, Culture Shift. Their works are recognizably aboriginal in form, but are concerned with issues confronting society in general.

The artworks reflect how aboriginal identity is an evolving construct but is never separated from the traditions and spirituality that sustained aboriginals through the period when, as the title of a piece by Nicholas Galanin suggests, they were subject to policies of Kill the Indian, Save the Man.

While some of the artists attempt to “unsettle the settlers,” as biennial curator Michael Patten writes, Culture Shift “testifies to the aspiration of a future where indigenous and non-indigenous peoples cohabit in peace, with consideration and appreciation for each other.”

The works in the Contemporary Native Art Biennial reflect the traditions that sustained aboriginals through the period when, as the title of Nicholas Galanin’s piece suggests, they were subject to policies of Kill the Indian, Save the Man.

Two artists, Kent Monkman and Caroline Monnet, created new films from materials in the National Film Board’s archives.

Monnet, an Algonquin, said that Mobilize, her reworking of archival footage, “is a call for action.”

In her film, people are building, showing off their skills and heading in a specific direction, she said. “It’s about being capable of movement, mobilizing ourselves to keep moving forward and encourage people to act for political, social change.”

Monnet said that in using old footage to speak about the future, she was expressing “an idea of contemporaneity while still honouring the past. As an indigenous person and filmmaker, there’s a perpetual negotiation between the modern and traditional, but I believe things are always moving forward.”

The biennial has three other venues: the Stewart Hall Art Gallery in Pointe-Claire, the McCord Museum and the Canadian Guild of Crafts.

Stewart Hall is the site of the West Coast Pavilion, whose artists include Luke Parnell, a Haida and Nisga’a from B.C. who created a totem during a six-week residency at the museum; Galanin, an Alaskan with Tlingit and Aleut heritage; and Sonny Assu, a Kwakwaka’wakw from B.C.

“My methodology is to protect cultural knowledge but still create art that is not devoid of meaning,” Parnell told a Vancouver gallery in 2013. “I’ve done that by showing that my work is part of a lineage and not a break from ‘tradition.’ ”

Céline Le Merlus, a curator at Stewart Hall, writes that aboriginal identity is no longer “a backward perspective” on differences, “but rather on the assertion of a current identity.” The biennial “embraces the current cultural revival that claims western influences to serve indigenous values and ancestral philosophies.”

Assu said in an interview that he grew up as an “average dude” who could pass for white, but had little knowledge of his indigenous heritage until he went to Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where he connected with aboriginal art students.

“I discovered myself through art,” he said. “I recognized the power of artwork to explore indigenous culture and make it accessible.”

Sonny Assu took inspiration from the Star Trek franchise for his intriguingly titled digital print They’re Coming! Quick! I have a better hiding place for you. Dorvan V, you’ll love it.

Assu melds the pop culture he grew up in with West Coast aboriginal iconography. His digital print — They’re Coming! Quick! I have a better hiding place for you. Dorvan V, you’ll love it. — is inspired by episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Dorvan V is a planet where aboriginals from Earth have moved to preserve their culture and later reject overtures to return to Earth. In Assu’s version, aliens are trying to remove the aboriginals from their new homeland to save them from the same “progress and profit” that led to their original move.

The work of 13 Inuit artists, including one from Greenland, is shown at the Northern Pavilion in the Canadian Guild of Crafts. The pieces clearly show how identity has changed since the Internet and wireless communications came to Nunavut in the 1990s, as guild curator Karine Gaucher writes in the catalogue.

Artwork like Samonie Toonoo’s Painter, a sculpture in stone and antler of a man carrying a can of paint, has a form that remains “strongly attached to traditional Inuit art,” Gaucher writes, but expresses a “dual identity, located somewhere between tradition and modernity, past and future, between stereotypes and reality.”

Samonie Toonoo’s Painter is a sculpture in stone and antler.

The McCord Museum is the biennial’s Education Pavilion, featuring events such as the screening on May 14 of Knowing You, Santa Fe by Steven Yazzie, a Navajo.

Monnet’s sculpture Concrete stands outside at the museum’s entrance. Inside, the McCord’s permanent exhibition dovetails nicely with the biennial’s theme. Wearing Our Identity: The First Peoples Collection is devoted to the importance of dress in expressing identity.

Nadia Myre, an Algonquin, is the museum’s artist-in-residence and has incorporated contemporary aboriginal works into Wearing Our Identity.

Myre also has an installation that is part of the biennial: Decolonial Gestures or Doing It Wrong? She made copies of items worn by aboriginals, based only on written instructions from sources like an 1859 issue of the Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times of London.

The challenge was in “trying to figure out how to make something without knowing what it was,” Myre said in an interview. “There were no illustrations to look at.”

The Lady’s Newspaper didn’t doubt that written instructions were enough: “This beautiful piece of bead-work carries us, by a natural transition of thought, far across the Atlantic into the recesses of Indian life.”

AT A GLANCE

The Contemporary Native Art Biennial — Culture Shift is presented at four locations:

Art Mûr, 5826 St-Hubert St. (artmur.com); opens Saturday, April 30 with a vernissage from 3 to 5 p.m.; continues to Saturday, June 18.

The first edition of the Montreal Printed Art Festival is centred on an exhibition of work by five printmakers at Atelier Circulaire that opens at noon on Saturday, April 30. The festival continues to Saturday, May 7 with workshops, exhibitions, talks and an art fair featuring the work of 60 artists.

The Montreal Printed Art Festival continues to Saturday, May 7 at Atelier Circulaire, 5445 de Gaspé Ave., Suite 105, and other venues. For more information, visit faimtl.ca.

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Also at 5445 de Gaspé Ave., La Nouvelle Biennale features work by 21 artists who are seen by curator Thomas Henry Ross as tapping into the zeitgeist.

The work of 26 Florida-based African-American landscape painters who formed a group in the 1950s to sell their art is presented in an exhibition at the Montreal Art Centre, sponsored by the U.S. embassy and consulate.

The artists sold their paintings to restaurants and motels along U.S. Route 1 for as little as $10, earning the tag of the Florida Highwaymen. Thirty-five paintings are on display.

The Florida Highwaymen continues to Sunday, May 29 at the Montreal Art Centre, 1844 William St. For more information, visit montrealartcenter.com.

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